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Hi,
for some reason, the tracking works fine, except for iPad. The iPad playbacks are not shown in the GA results. Would you have any leads?
Thanks, Pavel.
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Hi Pavel,
iPad is played in native player which doesn’t allow tracking. We could only track people leaving to native player, potentially pick them up when they come back too.
Cheers,
Alec
Hi Alec,
I am not sure if I fully understand. Are you saying that iPads are not tracked at all? I thought iPad uses the native player with flowplayer only during fullscreen mode. Also, I have ipads in my GA with the same fv flowplayer on the same site. Only during the site development, setting up cache and CDN, it stopped working somewhere. Also, are at least plays tracked if not the seconds?
Thanks,
Pavel.
Hi Pavel,
At one point, we had all iPad videos going to native as there are loading issues with fullscreen mode (not just with our player but with all players on iPad).
All we can track in native player is the exit to native player (i.e. the plays you want). Even returns are difficult to track (where exactly is the return coming from…).
Martin will let you know tomorrow exactly what it is we are currently tracking and what we can track going forward.
Making the web work for you, Alec
I see, thanks for explaining. We are about to run a video-campaign for our client which is international pharmaceutical firm. We need to count every playback of every video so with this new information, we are in troubles. Now it looks like we will have to go manually through CDN raw logs and that is not good for thousands of items. We can not buy another video solution as the site has been already approved to go by the client and we will start tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.
I would be ok if we would have at least the number of playbacks correct for each video across all the platforms and average plaback times per video excluding ios playbacks.
Regards,
Pavel.
Hi Pavel,
Thanks for the additional details.
Count clicks for iPads and not plays. It’s a device issue, not a software issue. You of course want the best user experience for your visitors, not a faulty experience with correct counting.
Making the web work for you, Alec
Hi Alec,
counting clicks for iPads is interesting idea. Can you, please, give me some lead how to do that?
Regards, Pavel.
Actually, I did some research around Google tags and have the solution. Thanks again for the good idea.
Pavel.
Hi Pavel,
Thanks for the update. I’m really glad you’ve got a working solution!
Any chance you could you post links to the documents you were using and a quick summary of your solution?
Making the web work for you, Alec
Hello Pavel,
we are using the Google Analytics tracking provided by the core Flowplayer code. It triggers as the user leaves the page.
I guess we can add a code which will get trigger when the video starts to load. I guess Flowplayer doesn’t use this approach as it might not count repeated video plays properly, but we could store that as a different event and then compare the two values and even compare them to raw HTTP access logs to see which one is more accurate.
Thanks,
Martin
Hi guys,
the original flowplayer method of collecting data upon leaving the page is not good if we want to have the precise number of playbacks. Closing Firefox with a running video for example prevents sending the tracking data completely. I know that there is no perfect overall scenario but aiming for exact playback number and approximate average of seconds played over each file seems to me very close. And it seems that we have the solution.
I am writing a mail to you so I can attach the screenshots.
Regards,
Pavel.
Hello Pavel,
we are testing code which reports video start time, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 and complete playback independently.
Could you please let us know what configurations you typically use? Is it just a single video player or playlist? Are the video files simple URLs, or do you use Amazon S3 signed URLs? Do you use YouTube or Vimeo? Do you use quality switching? That way we know what to test first.
Thanks,
Martin
Hey Martin, we use:
– single video player, never playlist
– videos are simple URLs, not Amazon S3
– never use YouTube, planning Vimeo for future project
– we do use quality switchingThanks,
Pavel.
Hello Pavel,
we released FV WordPress Flowplayer 2.3.13 now, see the release notes here to learn more about improved tracking.: https://foliovision.com/2015/04/detailed-google-analytics
There are some issues with quality switching though – if user switches in the middle of the video, it won’t count the video playback anymore – so the “Video start” event will be counter properly, but “video first/second/third quartile” and “Video complete” might not trigger anymore.
Thanks,
Martin
Hey Martin, thanks for the update.
Pavel.
